Opening Out

When later discussing The Adoption Papers , Jackie Kay has emphasised her primary concern in the poem with theme and form. That focus on theme evoked through voices has expanded throughout her work, “opening out,” in a phrase from Hugh MacDiarmid, to take in more and more of life, experience, and human diversity, and animating her poetry from the earliest to Fiere , Bantam , and the extraordinary Hogmanay poem “Fare Weel.” Though her poems retain a focus on family, identity, and relationships, they consistently move out from that core to encounter “other” in more and more, newer and newer forms. Fiere reveals two key kinds of experimentation, ways her poetry both stays grounded and opens out in new approaches to theme and, increasingly, the function of language – the many words needed to tell a story. More significantly, I demonstrate the complexity and “stylistic originality” in what can appear to be, and has been, read as straightforward, her “I” as a “protean self” inseparable from word choice in a country with three languages.